


The Hollow Temple

by ValaVulaVey



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst with a Happy Ending, Chronic Pain, F/M, Temporary Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-17
Updated: 2020-05-17
Packaged: 2021-02-23 12:50:30
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,992
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23745022
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ValaVulaVey/pseuds/ValaVulaVey
Summary: Rey tells herself she doesn’t need or want Ben Solo. That a Jedi only needs the Light. That if winning the war means having to kill him herself, that’s what she’ll do. She’ll give Leia her condolences, celebrate with her friends, and never think of him again.A strange planet with horrifying powers calls her bluff.
Relationships: Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 11
Kudos: 65
Collections: Id Pro Quo 2020





	The Hollow Temple

**Author's Note:**

  * For [LearnedFoot](https://archiveofourown.org/users/LearnedFoot/gifts).



The planet was tiny, barely qualifying as a planetoid, and it was hollow. Inside it was a mountain, and the mountain was a temple.

They landed their ships on opposite slopes of the mountain. One of them wandered up toward the peak, the other, down to the valley.

He shook his head as if to clear out the cobwebs. Something was wrong. Very, very wrong. He looked around and changed course.

She felt her eyes slip closed. When he found her and called out to her, it wasn’t her who turned to face him.

_No,_ the temple spoke with her mouth, and turned her body away. The ground crumbled beneath his feet and sent him tumbling over the edge, all the way down the slope. _Better._

The only name Rey had called him since they parted ways on Crait was _Kylo Ren_. She felt like she was betraying Leia’s trust every time his mother called him _my son_ where only Rey could hear and she replied with _Ren_ , but that didn’t stop her. She couldn’t keep _Ben Solo_ out of her heart, but she could damn well keep him out of her mouth.

Rey told herself she didn’t need or want Ben Solo. That a Jedi only needed the Light. That if winning the war meant having to kill him herself, that’s what she’d do. She’d give Leia her condolences, celebrate with her friends, and never think of him again.

The hollow temple said to that, _okay_.

Ben Solo died alone.

Ben Solo died in the dirt and the dark, broken and abandoned at the bottom of a ravine while Rey hung suspended above a mountain plateau in a blaze of serenity that was almost euphoric. Sweet enlightenment trickled like nectar into her ears and across her eyelids, coated her tongue, cloying and dampening her senses to the crude insignificance of the physical, while not a kilometer below, the combined weight of the galaxy’s sins and sorrows crushed him where he lay, writhing and screaming until he could no longer draw the breath or gather the strength for it. Rey’s mind emptied itself less and less slowly, alarm and resistance forgotten what might have been eons ago now. Turning quiet and clear as crystal, untainted and untethered by anything that once bound her to her biology, her ego, her life, all the selfish hopes and dreams and desires that kept her from surrendering herself wholly to the Light. Dissolving the boundaries that separated ( _made_ ) ‘Rey’, body and soul, from the whole of the Force, that let her understand how alone _she_ was, until –

– Ben Solo died, the guttering flame of his life abruptly snuffed out, and the impact punctured the bubble around Rey, sending the too-thin shadow of her soul crashing back into the weight of her own existence.

Ben Solo died and Rey lived because of it.

Rey lived. Dazed and overwhelmed and disoriented from the whiplash of being and unbecoming and being anew. Aware again of everything that wasn’t the Force so suddenly and acutely her flesh-and-blood couldn’t quite process it. Sobbing and gasping _no, no_ before anything else registered.

Rey lived and Ben Solo didn’t.

Rey lived _because_ Ben Solo no longer did, the violent loss of him the only thing more powerful than the gentle ascension the hollow temple had chosen for her. Oh, she’d played her part, recited all the right lines at all the right times – ‘I am Rey from Nowhere, and I am a Jedi like all true children of the Force before me’, ‘as long as the Light is in my heart I will never be alone’, ‘the Force will guide me, I follow the Light and only the Light’ – but there was a deeper truth buried in the ever-shifting sands between her feet and his. The stringent divide between Light and Dark was a line that neither of them would cross and which had never kept them apart before. This temple wasn’t about to start now. Rey was not the Light’s obediently empty vessel; Ben Solo was not the Dark’s fatally gluttonous repository. Whatever ritual had been meant to be enacted here today, it had failed when it took one of them before the other.

Rey lived, and without a second thought got to her unsteady feet, stumbled down the green slope of the mountain, and descended into Ben Solo’s barren grave.

The Dark had given everything – _taken_ everything – in this final bid for Ben’s soul. His face did not look peaceful in death. It reflected exactly what had killed him: torture. Agony physical, mental, and fundamental. Rey shut her eyes as tightly as she could, the sight boring through her its own unbearable anguish. Icy winds blew her unbound hair across her face, where it clung to the tear tracks on her skin as if to shield her from the intolerable truth. But it was too late for that. She’d already seen it, and in the back of her mind, whatever parts of her that hadn’t yet succumbed to the temple’s demands had _felt_ it all along too.

Rey knelt blindly in the rock-strewn mud. Her hands found Ben’s chest by touch alone. It was alright to hide from this, she told herself; it was only temporary. The next time she looked at him, there would be life behind his eyes again and his face would no longer be creased with pain.

The strange shrine of this hollow, inverted world had taken the energy that ought to be keeping him alive and tricked it into thinking there were no boundaries between him and the entire planet’s collective energies; scattered it like mist. Rey could feel it swirling all around her, fading into background radiation, the person he had been settling into the mud and rocks as nothing but a haunting echo. But he and her, they were linked at the brainstem, entangled down to the intangible core of them. Where one of them went, the other followed. And if that other wouldn’t follow? The one didn’t go. Ben Solo may have died alone, but he was never _alone_ , and so he wasn’t actually _dead_. All Rey had to do was remind his body and soul of that tiny little technicality.

But she feared the sight of his awful suffering would never leave her.

"Shhh, shhh," she whispered urgently, a heartbeat and a lifetime later, as if her insistence would make any difference. "Shhh, you’re okay, it’s me, I’ve got you, you’ll be alright. Don’t fight it, Ben. Relax. Breathe."

_Torture,_ she thought wildly. _Reversing a death by torture is its own form of torture._

Why hadn’t she thought of that? Ben jerked and writhed in her arms, blind to her voice and her touch, producing inhuman sounds that clearly said he’d be screaming his lungs out if his lungs would actually allow it. What was she thinking, _of course_ she hadn’t thought of it. Who would? Reversing a death by torture was its own torture, okay, understood. But it _shouldn’t_ be. It wasn’t right, it wasn’t _fair_.

"Just hold on, Ben," she urged, begged. "I’ll make this right, I swear."

Life flooded back into his body cell by agonized cell. His resistance grew accordingly. Twitchy, abortive motions turned into wide, uncoordinated flailing, groans into breathless cries. His eyes were unseeing, but open. He was alive, he was regaining the strength needed to stay that way, but the pain wasn’t stopping. Rey held Ben down by the elbows, guided the Force to where it needed to go, and tearfully cursed death for its cruelty.

Was it the manner of death, though, or the place he’d died in? The place that had _carried out the torture?_ This planet, the temple biome that made up the core of it, had called and called and called to Rey for months. It had wanted her – _only_ her. Every offer from her Resistance friends to go check it out together had filled her with revulsion. She’d needed to come alone, needed it so urgently she’d finally disabled all tracker and communicators on the Falcon to come here. Ben, ditto. They hadn’t spoken a friendly word to each other for the better part of the year until they both came out of hyperspace at the same time, hovering over the same mysterious planet, and the Force put them in each other’s co-pilot seats.

They’d locked eyes and it had seemed like the Force _screeched_ its aversion to the other’s presence. It had been jarring enough to shock them into a moment of civility, however brief.

_I think I was meant to come alone,_ Rey had admitted.

_Whatever is down there, it doesn’t want to be shared,_ Ben had mused. _Or perhaps ganged up on._

They’d stared, and stared, until, as one, they’d gone full throttle and raced each other to the surface, the Force howling its displeasure the whole way down – or so it seemed.

Now, Rey recognized it for the warning it was. They were _never_ meant to be here alone. Them arriving together hadn’t been what was wrong, it was them not doing so to _work_ together.

Now... Rey didn’t dare let her attention drift too far from summoning the life back into Ben, but now, the pull seemed completely, _conspicuously_ absent. As if the planet was reassessing – calculating a new strategy. The lack of its months-long presence raised the hair on the back of her arms.

_I’m here with you, Ben,_ she promised him. _I’m getting you out of here. We’re leaving_ together.

She’d buried her desire for Ben in the sand for so long, let the war they were on opposite sides of keep her from admitting it to even herself. She’d never had Leia’s courage. To admit she wanted him back, wanted him safe, wanted him home – wanted him to be _hers?_ The very enemy they were fighting to righteously vanquish? Unthinkable. Much safer to nod along with everybody else’s vengeful fantasies or legal musings. Rey didn’t even have his mother’s excuse for hoping for a different outcome. So after Ahch-To, the Supremacy, Crait, she’d never tried. She’d set aside her yearnings and desires and focused on survival and being the good girl she felt everybody else needed her to be, like she always had.

Well, so much for that. Nothing like being almost murdered with an overdose of selflessness to set a woman’s priorities straight.

"Rey?"

Below them, the First Order ship Ben had arrived in burst into a plume of fire. Her ears didn’t quite pick up the faint sound of his voice over the screech of the cannons and the rumbling of the explosion, but her heart heard him, her face turning toward him as if on its own accord.

_Ben._

He was looking at her incredulously, face pinched and hands trembling, hitched up against his chest as if unsure where to clutch at himself. But he was awake. He was aware. And through the haze of pain – physical, mental, fundamental – he was Ben.

Rey smiled tremulously and guided the Falcon out of atmosphere. "Welcome back."

"How..."

"That place tried to kill us."

From the corner of her eye, Rey saw him inspect his hands. In the Force, she felt his pain, and his confusion, and a whole jumble of other emotions.

"Rey," he said again, voice hoarse. "It didn’t just try. I was dead."

"Not dead enough to take you away from _me_ ," she said vehemently. "I don’t know why you’re still hurting, but we’ll figure it out and fix it."

"Why?"

_"Why?"_ She glanced away from her piloting to shoot him a disbelieving look. "You wanna stay this way?"

"No..."

"Well, I don’t want you to either, that’s why."

"The pain you’re feeling isn’t real," Ben ground out, shifting in his seat with his eyes clenched shut. "It’s just an echo of my pain. You can shut it out."

"This isn’t about _me_ , Ben! I don’t want _you_ to feel like this, period."

Ben didn’t answer. A fist closed around Rey’s lungs. He didn’t believe her.

Rey and Chewie kept a small crate full of emergency medkits on the Falcon. It was one of the Resistance’s primary evacuation vessels, so they kept it stocked in preparation of the worst. As soon as they were safely in open space, Rey collected all the painkillers they had and gave Ben the maximum recommended dosage. It helped, somewhat – which was more than part of her had been expecting – but it was hardly a fix, let alone a cure. And if she kept him on the maximum dosage, topping it up as often as it was safe to, they still only had enough to keep the edge off his suffering for two weeks.

Under normal circumstances that would’ve been just fine by Rey, but she didn’t dare assume it would be enough for _these_ injuries to heal. And the absolute last thing she wanted to do was to just sit back, wait and see whether the pain would just go away on its own.

Her gut told her not to count on it. Her heart simply couldn’t bear the sight of him in such pain.

The Ahch-To Jedi texts made no mention of the temple that had done this to them. Rey had checked before she first set out to find it, drawn inexorably to the place but not yet quite so enchanted by its siren song as to throw all her caution to the wind. Now she set the navicomputer to find the nearest settlement of sentient life forms and pointed the Falcon in that direction.

"I’m going to ask around, see what the locals know about that place," Rey told Ben.

"I’m coming with you," he said.

"Absolutely not."

"Oh, I’m your prisoner now?"

"You were dead six hours ago! You can barely stand!" she exclaimed, and watched in dismay (and no small amount of annoyance) as he promptly got up from the co-pilot’s chair to prove her wrong, swung himself out of the cockpit at a speed usually reserved for those fleeing a debt, escaping an excruciatingly awkward interaction, or trying to keep up enough momentum not to crash... and, predictably, crash-landed into a wall within ten meters. For a moment, Rey closed her eyes, torn between hysterical laughter and equally hysterical sobs. Or maybe a simple snarl of frustration. Then she hurried after him and maneuvered her shoulder underneath his arm so she could steer him in the direction of the bunks.

"Ben, use your head," she said quietly, tiredly. "I’m leaving you _on the ship_. That’s the opposite of imprisonment. I’m the one who should be worried you’ll take it and strand me here."

Ben grit his teeth against a renewed flare-up of pain. "What makes you so sure I won’t?"

"What do _you_ think?"

He looked at her like, amidst the pain of dying in some arcane Force ritual, being dragged back up the agonizing slope of death, and having the agony linger, that question was the most painful thing of all.

_‘Don’t go there! On the surface, everything dies, and all those dead things’ spirits haunt the hollow world on the inside.’_

"Yeah, thanks, I could’ve thought of that one myself," Rey groused into the sash covering her face as she left the colony’s house of worship.

The local historical society, at least, could tell her that the system’s black sheep of a planet had known no serious unexplained incidents in recorded history. The occasional psychological disturbance because of the ‘hauntings’, but nothing some form of mental support or another couldn’t help. The surface was a criminal hotspot, the slow killers of radiation and not-quite-breathable air perfect tools for everything from torturing information out of people to punishing them with a slow death, but all such deaths were accounted for. The cages and chains used to keep victims from escaping below the surface were a dead (ahem) giveaway. Never any Jedi involvement or Dark magic that anyone knew of; the system had never been part of the Republic, and so fell outside Jedi jurisdiction.

The most relevant information they could give Rey was an ancient legend of a great ruler, conqueror-negotiator-king of a civilization predating any they knew now, predating the Jedi, and stronger in the Force than any who had come before them. Beloved and respected, as far as such figures went, until one day they slew their last true foes, a cruel band of warlords, also Force-blessed, and they were left undisputed ruler of what was at the time considered all of civilized space. Then the hollow planet called to them – promising reward or challenge, no-one knew – and they answered, never to be heard from again. Their empire fell to chaos and infighting after their sudden disappearance, old disputes and new rivalries winning out over unity and order, and its territories were at war for centuries after.

Well, damn.

As soon as Rey spoke the words "so my friend and I visited the hollow planet yesterday..." at the hospital, the medics scolded her to within an inch of her life for ignoring the warning beacons and demanded to see both of them for testing and potential treatment immediately.

Finn would have said something about there being a silver lining to every cloud, or however those watery planet sayings went.

"I’ll fetch him," she promised.

When she arrived back on the Falcon, Ben was asleep. His face was smooth and relaxed. His breathing was deep and even.

He was no longer in pain.

Breathless, Rey sank down on the edge of his cot and reached out. Her hand stayed itself millimeters from his face, his hair. Relief made her heart beat fit to burst.

His eyebrow twitched. His breath stuttered.

The echo of an ache flared between Rey’s temples.

"No, no, no no no, shhh," she murmured, letting herself touch him and pulling the sash down to her chin as she brushed his hair away from his face. "Shhh, it’s over, you’re better, there’s nothing –"

But it wasn’t over. Rey could almost _see_ the pain coming back, spreading like ink in water where she was touching his face, where she was pressed up against his hip, everywhere. Even his heart; peaceful, dreamless sleep turning to formless nightmare, fear and pain clouding his thoughts.

_I found you, I brought you back, I got you out,_ she thought, all her relief flipped over into despair. _Why couldn’t I_ fix _you?_

Ben moaned and opened his eyes, and Rey snatched back her hand as if burned.

"Ow," he said.

"Dammit," she said.

He rubbed his head and sat up gingerly. "You’re telling me."

"You were fine when I got here, right? I didn’t imagine that?"

"I was. The pain stopped some time after you left."

Rey massaged her temples too, feeling a headache all of her own coming up.

"Lucky you didn’t take the ship and strand me as soon as you were feeling better then, I guess."

"I’ll make sure to save the collapsing from exhaustion for after the running, next time," he deadpanned.

She gave him a weak smile. He studied her like he was waiting for something.

"So now what?"

"They want to see us at a hospital in the city. Maybe the problem is something simple and they can fix it."

"Tell me you don’t actually believe that."

"We should at least _try_."

"They’ll probably have better painkillers, so don’t get me wrong, I’m going." Ben stood, steady on his feet now, despite the return of the pain. He took a deep, fortifying breath. Spine straight, head up, he could almost pass for his old self. "Lead the way."

Rey fetched a second set of sashes from the clothes locker she’d commandeered for herself on the ship. They were the dark grey ones she’d worn on her attempt to spirit him away from Snoke’s ship, so many months ago. There was an irony or a meaning in that, she thought, but her nerves were too shot to figure out what it was, exactly. She helped Ben tuck them into his belt and wrap them around his face so they matched, and then she did lead the way. At the hospital, she told the medics that their people had strict rules for who was allowed to see their faces at what times. So a droid without facial recognition programming was brought in to take care of any tests or treatments that required their faces to be uncovered, ensuring that neither of their identities would be discovered.

"You –" Rey was eventually told by the lead medic. "– would benefit from some nutritional supplements, but are otherwise in good health and show none of the usual effects of visiting the hollow planet."

"And you..." She turned to Ben. "You’re physically completely fine. But your brain scans show strong activity associated with psychosomatic symptoms, and your blood levels indicate a great amount of emotional stress. The pain you report is without a doubt real – the evidence is all there in your blood and brain – but there is no physical cause that we can find. We believe you may be suffering an extreme reaction to the, for lack of a better term, ‘haunting’ of the hollow planet. Perhaps exacerbated by pre-existing stresses and fears. I’ve never heard of a reaction quite so severe as yours, but trauma is a varied beast and –"

Rey managed to convince Ben to stick around for almost two weeks. Just long enough for the doctors to exhaust their scant few possible medical solutions to the problem, but more than enough to make it clear that the pain wouldn’t go away on its own. Citing more cultural restrictions, they avoided anything that involved Ben talking about what was bothering him as a solution. He was a remarkably poor liar, even by omission. Opening up would have made him too identifiable – if there had been a single bone in his body willing to do so, that is. Eventually, they used those same imaginary restrictions as an excuse to leave the hospital’s ever more fascinated and fanatic care and ‘try their luck with the mind healers at home’.

"No, if it was a temple dedicated to the Dark Side it wouldn’t have done what it did to you," Ben said on the second day after that.

Their theorizing kept going in circles. Rey agreed with him, but with the Light Side ruled out for the same-opposite reason, she had a hard time thinking of what else the purpose of the temple could be. It called to powerful Force-sensitives, seemingly indiscriminately. It then killed them by taking however they related to the Force and practiced its use, and submerging them in it until death followed. But why? To what end? All it seemed to do to Ben was... spiritually compost him. And not even in a ‘we have Force batteries to charge for whatever reason and powerful users make the best energy source’.

Ben didn’t seem the slightest bit jealous of the fact that _she’d_ gotten the gentle euthanasia of enlightened bliss while _he’d_ been violently drowned in a vat of pure, concentrated torture. Rey wasn’t sure whether to be impressed, disturbed, or just baffled.

They were sprawled out in opposite directions in the ship’s biggest bunk as they talked. Carefully not touching, but close enough to do so if they chose. At first, the pain and the drugs had made him extra wound-up and standoffish, stomping and snapping around the hospital and wrecking his room more than once because the pain just. wouldn’t. _stop_. But even the energy for that had left him by now. Leaving him lax, willing to let her do things and be places she’d never imagined he’d allow her to be. The hospital had given him a brace around his left forearm that administered a steady stream of painkillers into his bloodstream and let him press a button for more when the pain flared up worse than usual. Rey could see him rubbing his fingers along the ridges and dips and contours of the brace like he did when he was having an especially hard time but the device had reached the maximum amount of analgesic it would give him – _could_ give him, before the dose became dangerous.

She was afraid to ask – had been all this time – but in the end, she didn’t have to, not with him. His mouth twitched bitterly.

"Pain is power, but this power doesn’t want to be mine. I’m useless like this. Incapacitated by my own element. Maybe that was the damn planet’s whole purpose."

And then there was that: Rey suffered no such side-effects of her near-death by detachment. Because she hadn’t actually died like he had? Because the trauma to her soul had simply affected her differently, snapping her out of her banthashit? Because the temple had an alignment bias after all and didn’t think the Light needed any further punishment? She couldn’t think of any way to tell.

Ben scoffed and shook his head, staring at the bunk’s ceiling. "Whatever _you_ end up doing to me, remember to thank the hollow temple in the medal ceremony they throw you for it."

Rey frowned. "Doing to you? I could’ve left you there for dead. What could I possibly want to do to you that wouldn’t have been better done by leaving you there?"

"Put me on trial. Ransom me. Make an example of me. Hand me to your wounded, bloodthirsty masses and sacrifice me to their rage. Exploit me for my power. Lock me in a dungeon somewhere and keep me all to yourself to use or ignore at your whim..."

Raising herself on her elbows, Rey could only stare. Two weeks. More than two weeks they’d been together now. Two weeks of biting their tongues and putting on a show, because there was always medical staff or a tiny floating security droid within earshot; two weeks of him silently yet relentlessly demonstrating to her how to block out his pain over and over again, until, when she finally gave in, he seemed to sag in relief himself; two weeks of cohabitation in the hospital’s long-term family quarters; two weeks of _teamwork_. Two weeks of grating idleness and pretending they hadn’t been abruptly ripped from a war against each other, sure, but...

She’d thought he’d relaxed around her. He’d stopped radiating the feeling that she could show her true colors at any moment, at the slightest provocation, so slowly and gradually it _had_ to be a natural and genuine change of heart instead of him catching on to his own indiscrete mind and belatedly covering his tracks. But now here they were _again_.

"Ben. You can’t seriously think that."

"I’ve been ‘saved’ before. There’s always a price," he said tonelessly.

There was no cosmic warning signal to tell her everything was all wrong again this time. Just her own heart, breaking.

Ben Solo had died alone, but even though she’d brought him back to life, he, or that varied beast that was trauma, or the galaxy or the Force or _something_ , seemed determined that Rey had to live without him anyway.

"There’s no price," she choked out. "I didn’t bring you back for some ulterior motive, I just... I just..."

"Just _what_ , Rey?" He looked at her, finally, and everything about it was so bruised and exhausted. "What are we doing? What are you waiting for?"

"Nothing. I didn’t want you to die, so I made you not-dead, and I want you well, so that’s what I’m trying to do now. Because I care about you. That’s all."

" _Why?_ To what end?"

Rey wondered about side-effects. How much of this was Ben genuinely not buying it and how much was the pain, and the drugs, and the torturously dark thoughts that had _killed him_ just a fortnight ago. Not like he’d needed that to get like this. _I’ve been ‘saved’ before. There’s always a price._ But it didn’t help, either.

Fuck those people. Fuck everything.

"That _is_ the end, Ben. It’s its own end. If you think I had _any_ kind of plan for all this, you are vastly overestimating the amount of thought I put into it," Rey said frankly, gently.

"So you’re, what, going to fly around with me hiding in the back seat forever?" he grunted, sitting up and swinging his legs over the edge of the bunk. "When you return to the Resistance to win the war for them, you’re not going to hand me over to my mother, join your happy shiny friends, become the new Luke Skywalker and make more new good little Jedi, and replace me in fulfilling all the expectations I failed to live up to as a boy?"

Instead of answering, she asked: "And what are you going to do? Hide out on my back seat forever? Don’t you have a war to win and a galaxy to rule yourself? You keep going on about me _doing things to you_ like you can’t even try to fight me off, or aren’t free to walk away at any time. What are _you_ waiting for?"

He gave her a long, flat stare. "I figured since I have your attention anyway, I might as well use it to try to talk some sense into you."

Rey felt the corner of her mouth quirk up. "Funny how you haven’t been doing that at all, then."

This time, he looked away.

Rey shuffled along the mattress until she was sitting next to him, and put a hand on his shoulder.

"Ben..."

He jerked away, pain shooting down his spine like lightning.

"I’m not an end unto itself, Rey." He staggered to his feet. "I’m a means."

"I’ll be the judge of that," she said. She wanted to go after him, but her instincts told her that would probably just make it worse, so she fisted her hands in the blankets instead. "My end goal is you. Everything else – it’ll be complicated, but I’ll figure it out. We’ll figure it out together, ideally."

"Not complicated, impossible."

"There’s no such thing. Especially if you’d just turn."

He sighed. "You first."

"What is it about galactic domination that makes you want it so badly, anyway? What’s the end goal of _that?_ I’ve been around your mother long enough to wonder what anybody could possibly see in the job. What you’d really get out of it, at the end of the day."

If he had an answer to that, it wasn’t one he could bring himself to tell Rey.

In agreement on nothing except that they’d continue to wordlessly shirk their respective responsibilities in order to stick together for a while longer, they soon fired up the Falcon’s hyperdrive and left the hollow planet far behind them, where it belonged. Rey jumped half a dozen times, recorded a reassuring message to the Resistance, docked at a space station to send it, and then jumped another half dozen times. They had enough emergency rations on the ship to last them months, but Rey had gotten a taste for "real" food during their stay at the hospital, so that nightcycle (local time: ass crack of dawn) she made planetfall in the nearest inhabited system and went out for groceries while Ben pored over star charts, looking for something, anything useful to do in search of a cure.

She hadn’t been gone a quarter of an hour before Ben told her with poorly-concealed, tentative wonder: _The pain is going down._

Rey stopped dead in her tracks in the sleepy market square. _It is? That’s amazing!_

_Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. It went away for a few hours and nothing more once before,_ Ben made a conscious effort to say, though Rey could feel his mind spinning with relief.

_Let’s not look a gift fathier in the mouth either,_ Rey shot back, and added ‘find bakery’ to her grocery list. The rustic little planet they’d landed on was located along a hyperlane to Corellia; thick Corellian accents surrounded her on all sides. It gave her an idea.

She got the distinct impression of being watched – or, as the case may be, contemplated while actively engaged in telepathic conversation. _I’m going to take a nap,_ Ben told her. _If this rust bucket_ isn’t _where you left it when you get back, it means I’ve been either stolen along with the ship or rolled down the ramp in my sleep. Check the nearest comfy crate._

Whether it was moods wings or the past few weeks doing wonders for his sense of humor _somehow_ or Rey finally spending enough time around him to recognize when his deadpan absurdities really were jokes and not more horrifying ideas Snoke had planted (as Leia would say) in his impressionable pre-teen brain like candy to lure him into the Dark Side’s seedy speeder van, the man was getting funnier and funnier. His face still looked like it would crack into a million pieces if he tried to smile, but hey, progress!

Rey took her time shopping, enjoying the sunlight and the breeze and the feeling of Ben’s peaceful slumber in the back of her mind. She hoped it brought him good dreams. The pain made it so hard for him to sleep, and when he did, she could sense the nightmares that plagued him all the way from her own bunk.

By the time she made it back to the ship, Ben was awake again, sitting at the round table in the ship’s common space. And unfortunately, his eyes were once again tight with pain. His tense face and shoulders made an uneasy contrast to his sleep-sluggish mannerisms.

"Already?" Rey lamented.

"Of course."

"Do you at least feel rested?"

"Yeah. Marginally better overall." His voice was still hoarse with sleep – and his tongue loose, apparently. "I went out like a light and slept like the dea– like a baby. While it lasted."

"While it lasted," Rey agreed with a sigh. She set the Corellian cake box she’d searched half the city for on the round table and pushed it in his direction. "Here. It was supposed to be to celebrate, but maybe it’ll work as comfort food instead."

Frowning, Ben opened the box of ryshcate. And stared.

He looked up at her intensely. "This is my favorite food."

"I know."

"How?"

"I told your mother what you did for me in Snoke’s throne room and she’s been unloading stories of what a sweet, wonderful boy you were on me ever since."

Rey said nothing about the suspicious sheen in his eyes. He had enough trouble looking her in the eye for the rest of the day as it was.

She waited until late that night to bring up the other thing she’d brought back from the market, too.

"So, uh, have you been keeping up with the news lately?"

"Depends," he said, and took a gulp of what Rey had been told was a calming herbal infusion that promoted dreamless sleep. "What are we talking about?"

"The coup."

"Hux’s? I wouldn’t call that news," he said neutrally.

It had been to Rey and whatever remained of the free holonet. She stared daggers into the side of his skull and pointedly sipped her own tea. (Flower blend; a marvel she’d only found out about that day and had to try immediately.)

"I wouldn’t even call it a surprise," Ben went on. "I knew he’d do that before I left. He’s been looking for an excuse to since he found Snoke’s corpse. Nobody respects him enough to back him once I return, though. It’s not a problem."

"And the coup _against_ Hux, is that a problem for you, Supreme Leader?"

That finally got him to look at her. His expression was guarded. "Who won?"

"The holonet hasn’t found out any names yet. The one they think is in charge is a dark-skinned woman, scar on her lip."

"Oh, that’s fine, then. She’s one of mine."

"Your loyalists are taking power back for you and you still won’t return to them?"

They drank their teas for a while before he answered.

"No," he said eventually. "If for no other reason than that if they discovered my newfound weakness – and they would – even my greatest supporters would probably eat me alive."

They might, but Rey hadn’t yet despite all the time and opportunity she’d had already. And regardless of all his paranoia and inability or unwillingness to believe it would stay that way, he was willing to wait out the betrayal he seemed to consider inevitable by her side.

"But you do have other reasons too, don’t you?" she whispered.

He shrugged, hiding his face in his mug. Rey followed suit, hiding her hopeful smile.

Leia had been right all along. It didn’t _have_ to take a resounding military defeat, a duel to the death, a protracted, galaxy-spanning trial, or a common enemy to team up against. Maybe all it would take was a cup of warm water, a sachet of kindness, enough time to let it steep, and a few spoonfuls of benevolently selfish _he’s mine_.

They had very little in the way of a plan. What wisdom (Ben nearly coughed up a lung) they possessed of their respective predecessors was no help, Ben admitted Luke Skywalker had been pestering him from the afterlife right up until the day the hollow temple started calling for him but was nowhere to be found since, and there was a chronic shortage of reliable and easily available Force lore in the rest of the galaxy, since the Jedi had effectively monopolized both Force-sensitives and schools of Force philosophy back in their day, and the Empire had done its level best to wipe out all traces of them afterward.

So they picked the nearest planet known for its strong or presence or unusual properties in the Force, and flew. They visited sacred mountain lakes said to purify your Force signature. They visited brightly-lit meditation chambers where you were lowered onto pillars reaching up from an abyss so deep the bottom was too dark to see. They raided a few ancient temples, Jedi and Sith alike, and obediently bought tickets for a tour through the ruins of a site that predated both.

They even swung around Ilum.

("I don’t need a new crystal!"

"The one you have now is broken! Maybe that’s the issue!"

"Is not!"

"You won’t know until you’ve tried! But your lightsaber is a portable workplace hazard either way, you need to fix it!"

"Fix does not mean replace!")

Rey was the one who came back with a new crystal in the end. Two, even.

("A staff," she said, bright-eyed, holding the purple chunks of kyber up to the light. "But _made of sabers_."

She could feel him laughing at her, and it was worth it.)

An order of unusually long-limbed, golden-furred beings tried out their famed telekinetic massage treatment on Ben, a Force-sensitive dancing troupe performed a musical blessing for him and dozens of others who had sought them out for their skills, and the galaxy’s most talkative and unfit-for-hermitage hermit helped Rey get the hang of a few tricky bits of Force-healing the books from Ahch-To only mentioned in passing.

"But this would probably work better –" the old man unfortunately pointed out. "– if your touch wasn’t also causing your friend more pain."

Rey halted the circular motions she’d been making against Ben’s back and drew back her hands. He let out a tremulous breath of relief and slumped over on his bench. He hadn’t meant to, she could tell, but the point was that he’d been holding it in at all.

She couldn’t keep a note of accusation from creeping into her voice. "So it _wasn’t_ working."

"I was willing to wait to see if it would," Ben rasped, even as his head drooped nearly to his knees.

Put like that, she couldn’t blame him. Weeks had turned into months and the third month was dragging on, and his pain burned undiminished, and every living touch just made it worse. Rey couldn’t reach over when he slumped back in his seat with his eyes screwed up from the endless ache and move a lock of hair from his face. She couldn’t accidentally-on-purpose brush his hand with hers when she passed him something, or press up close to his side to watch him cook Real Food in the Falcon’s tiny galley. She couldn’t press her fingertips to the pulse point at his throat or wrist to reassure herself that no matter how awful he felt, he wasn’t _dying_ again. Couldn’t pretend to trip and fall into his waiting arms. Couldn’t slip into his bunk at night to chase the nightmares away. Couldn’t bury her fingers into his hair and tug him down and _bloody kiss him already_.

Not without torturing him.

(Rey had lived her entire life without a kind touch on Jakku, so she blamed these cravings and fantasies on her newfound addiction to romantic holo films. Ben called it a hobby. Rey called it ‘I have repairs to make to the death trap we’re floating around in, I can’t just keep sitting down and doing nothing!’ Ben called _that_ ‘Welcome to the proudest tradition this ship has known since it left Uncle Lando’s hands.’)

He was alive, he was here with her, he was obviously as changed and affected by their experience in the hollow planet as Rey was despite refusing to show it as clearly, he wanted the same things she did and he was willing to let her take them, give them, even if he couldn’t trust them – and _still_ , Rey couldn’t have him. Couldn’t give herself to him body and soul and see if she’d get to keep all of him in return. It wasn’t right. It wasn’t fair.

"Rey," Ben sighed. "I’ll live. It’s not the end of the world."

Rey was tempted to reply that maybe not, but it might be the end of _her_.

That night, she tried meditating on a solution, hoping that the change of scenery since she’d done that last might mean there were different answers available to come flowing to her on the current of the Force, and not stopping to think too hard on whether that was how it worked.

Once again, she found no answers out there. She was beginning to think there were none to be had.

Their circumstances made them practically inseparable. They lived together on the ship; they went out to buy supplies together because Ben was a rich Core planet snob who wouldn’t let Rey just make sensible food choices, oh no, he had ‘standards’; they visited sites together because Rey was no longer comfortable simply assuming he’d be okay. The answer didn’t come to them until they parted for the first time since the ryshcate. She went on a quick grocery run while he was still trying to wash the stink of their ill-considered trek through a haunted swamp from his hair.

She was on her way back when Ben called out to her.

_Rey, stop._ His voice in her head was not a voice, and yet it trembled. _Don’t come any closer to the ship._

Rey’s heartbeat kicked into overdrive. _What? Why? What’s happening?_

_The pain. It stopped when you left._

_Again?_ she thought, not yet understanding.

_It..._ Ben hesitated, and when he next spoke, his ‘voice’ was hollow. _I think it stopped_ because _you left._

Now Rey’s heart stopped in its tracks. _No. No, that can’t be right._

_I can feel you getting closer,_ he said, _and it_ hurts.

Rey wanted to deny it. Wanted to argue that she was the one who _saved_ him, the one who’d brought him back from the dead and helped him look for a way to fix the side-effects all this time. That she wanted him to be okay more than anyone, she’d fight his own mother for the position if that’s what it took for him to get better. That she’d found him in the mud and got him to work again and cleaned him up, and that made him hers. Argue that she _loved him_.

She couldn’t.

_All this time,_ Ben choked out. _Being around you is_ why _it hurt._

Rey sent a courier to bring Ben the supplies she’d bought, and Ben shook the boy’s hand before sending him on his way.

_Barely a tingle,_ he reported. _Nothing like when I touch you._

They barely spoke another word to each other the whole day. What was there to be said?

Three months. Of completely preventable agony.

Rey sat on a bench in a nearby public park, watching blue-stemmed and purple-plumed reeds sway in the breeze while green-flecked waterfowl popped in and out, until nightfall painted it all black and tiny urban predators crept out of hiding, paying no notice to the statuesque human watching them sneak up on whatever feathered stragglers they could get their claws on.

_Rey,_ Ben admonished.

_Shut up._

_I’ve made some calls. There’s a room waiting for one of us at the inn overlooking the park you’re in now. Your call._

She leaned her elbows on her knees and put her face in her hands.

_Just get out of the cold and eat something,_ he urged.

Rey didn’t answer. She was busy keeping herself from crying. Rey was not the one in this equation who ought to be crying.

Ten minutes later, Ben barked _"Hey!"_ from barely a meter away, and her head snapped up.

"What are you doing?!" she cried out, but he just grabbed her wrist and pulled her to her feet. "Ben, stop, you’re hurting yourself!"

"Clearly one of us has to," was all he said, grimacing. "The room or the ship. Pick one."

She tried to pull out of his grip, but he just held on tighter. "Fine, the room! What the hell is wrong with you?!"

"Love hurts, get used to it. I have."

Rey stared. "What did you just say?"

"I’ve had all day to get used to not feeling like my insides are on fire anymore and now they’re on fire again. I am not in the mood for games right now," Ben said between clenched teeth. "Come on. I’ll walk you to the inn."

"I don’t want you to walk me to the inn, I want you to walk away."

"Too bad. We can’t always have it all. Now come on."

Nothing else for it, so she followed him out of the park. Neither of them speaking, he led her to the inn, a large yet homey-looking building in the local style, right up the steps to the entrance, where light from inside illuminated him through the engraved transparisteel doors.

"I made the reservation under your name," he said. "Tonight and tomorrow night have been paid for. After that will be automatically taken out of my account. They’re never full this time of year, but they might have to put you in a different room if you decide to stay longer."

He looked like death warmed over. Rey wasn’t the one who should be crying, but she couldn’t help it, she started crying anyway.

"I don’t want to leave you." She scrubbed at her eyes, sobbing. "But I don’t want to hurt you."

"We can’t always have it all," he repeated. His voice was more gentle but also more strangled than before. "But I haven’t left yet. Stay. Eat. Sleep. We’ll talk in the morning."

_You can’t save someone who doesn’t want to be saved,_ a fellow scavenger had once told her, when she was still a child. Rey wasn’t sure why she kept thinking about it that night.

She understood the reasoning: there was only so much of your time, energy, and resources you could pour into somebody else’s sun delirium, or spice habits, or plain lack of will to live, before their problems dragged you down into the sinking sands with them. Especially when everybody was just barely scraping by, like on Jakku. Sometimes, all the effort and desire and goodwill in the world was just a pebble against the durasteel wall of where someone’s head was at. It wasn’t right, it wasn’t fair, but it was the reality of the situation, and reality didn’t care about either of those things. They only existed inasmuch as people managed to inject them into the indifferent rock and gas and ecosystem around them.

Rey had always hated that saying, because it _wasn’t_ fair, it _wasn’t_ right, and she had an inexplicable, uncompromising belief that reality _should_ be yielding to conviction. Somehow.

Force-how, as it had turned out.

She hated it even more now, because it wouldn’t leave her head and _it didn’t even apply!_ Convincing Ben that their bond wasn’t a trick, her affection wasn’t a trap, history wasn’t doomed to repeat itself and the future she’d seen when they first brushed hands from an impossible distance not an impossibility, convincing him that love didn’t have to equal pain, _still_ wouldn’t change the fact that being close to him caused him literal, physical agony. It would just make things worse: add the certainty of its loss to what they were being forced to give up.

Then there was the whole issue of ‘doesn’t _want_ to be helped’ versus ‘can’t even conceive of what any so-called _help_ would accomplish’, which made most of the examples Rey could think of from her own experience only more tragic and intolerable. If ‘saving him’ was even the right word for what she was doing – so maybe Rey herself still wasn’t entirely comfortable with the idea of loving and wanting him solely for the sake of loving and wanting him, without the justification of it being a ‘good deed’ and ultimately furthering the cause of the Light; so _what_ – then unwillingness certainly wasn’t Ben’s problem. It was a lack of faith in the benevolence of the universe.

And who could blame him? Certainly not Rey. Just look what had happened! She’d loved him enough to save him, and it _punished_ them for it. If their roles had been reversed, if she had been the one to die before him, bringing her back would probably have killed Ben and left Rey so full of ‘Light’ she walked away with a grateful smile on her face, never to look back. The hollow temple would have stuffed her so full of that failed Jedi ivory tower detached enlightenment she’d been trying to use to take her mind off of a future with Ben, she’d have choked on her own self-deception and thanked the temple for it.

Rey gave up and allowed herself to cry.

It wasn’t right, it wasn’t fair, but it was what they had. And she loved him. So she’d have to accept it.

"It was your father’s ship, he’d want you to have it."

"And then I murdered him."

"He’d already forgiven you mid-murder. I wanted to mount your head on a pike that whole week and even I saw that."

"It’s not like I’d have much use for it if I went back to the First Order."

"Back to..." Rey gaped at the holo image of him. No. ‘If’ was the key there. His eyes were still lowered in thought. "Tell me that’s not what you’re going to do."

"If I stay away much longer, the infighting might tear the whole thing apart."

"Good. Let it."

"They’d tear _me_ apart if I showed them any of my newfound weaknesses."

"Then don’t show them _any_ of yourself."

"I don’t like anybody there."

"I am shocked. Shocked, I tell you."

"But..."

"UGH."

Ben looked at her wryly. "If only that was a valid argument to walk away from it all."

"Why isn’t it?"

He gave her a Look.

Rey hesitated. "Seriously. Why not? What good would come from you going back? You never answered when I asked – what is it you get out of being there, leading them? And how can you stay away for three months with no problem, but now you suddenly _have_ to go back?"

He looked away and didn’t answer for a long time. In the end, the words came with difficulty, as if he was struggling to unearth their meaning from a thick layer of mud. Rey had to bite her lip to keep from launching into a long-winded spiel of objections before he could get out five sentences.

"I have nowhere else to go. I don’t know how else to... how else to feel... like I’m _enough_. Doing enough. To live up to... to everything I was born into. The power and the history and. All of it. I’m not cut out for the simple life – loving and being loved and having that be enough – _clearly_. So if I don’t live up to my potential and finish my grandfather’s great work, what was I ever good for?"

Rey focused very hard on keeping her murderous rage from Ben, lest he get the wrong idea.

Swallowing thickly, he shook his head. "That used to be it, anyway. I, uh... dying really..."

"I love you," Rey said, blinking back tears. He looked stricken. "I know it doesn’t matter anymore, but I love you. I need you to know that. Before you –" Her voice hitched. "Before you leave."

"I’m not actually going back to the First Order, you know that, right?" Ben said with sudden urgency.

She let out a watery laugh. "I can read between the lines, Ben. You don’t have to follow in your grandfather’s footsteps to do something great, if that’s what you want. Or if you want the simple life, maybe you just needed the freedom to. If you’re turning over a new leaf, then as far as I’m concerned as the New Republic’s closest-to-qualified arbiter of everything Dark Side, the entire galaxy is open to you. And if I’m ever in the way of where you want to be, I’ll happily move over a kilometer for you. I... I..."

"Thank you," he said solemnly.

When pressed, Ben decided to leave with the Falcon two days later. He pressed her back to use his (okay, their) credit account, filled with untraceable ill-gotten First Order gains, to buy a good ship of her own.

Rey wasted no time doing so. Once made, she hated dwelling on her painful but necessary choices. It only ever tempted her to take them back, and she couldn’t afford that. Not on Jakku, not in battle, and not now.

They’d said their goodbyes. Time to move on.

She almost dubbed her ship the _Ryshcate_.

_Beyond_ time to move on.

_I’m taking off. Be well, sweetheart,_ she told Ben the night before he was set to leave himself, and jumped to hyperspace before he could reply.

She didn’t let her heart break until she emerged into a whole new star system and found not a trace of him there. She took deep, slow breaths of recycled air that had never passed through Ben’s lungs. Let her mind expand into open space around her, finding no trace of his blazing-bright mind to wind through like smoke.

Empty. That was what her life was going to be without Ben. Barely half of what it could have been. Perhaps the bond would start showing them glimpses of each other again now that the distance between them was back, but having known the real thing, it would never compare. Connected so closely and miraculously, yet doomed to live their lives apart or literally suffer the consequences. Parallel lines, never to meet again.

It was all so wrong, so unfair. But Rey was determined. She wanted Ben to be alive and to be well, and if this was the only way, so be it. She’d rather be without him than be the cause of his suffering. Tough shit if that made her feel _lonely_. She’d been lonely all her life until Ben, but she’d always managed to make the best of it. She could do that again.

The Resistance would have changed security codes twice in the three months she’d been gone, and without the Falcon she’d lost her other primary means of communication (though making sure Ben had it if he ever chose to use it was worth it). So her first order of business was to find another way to contact them. She’d rendezvous with her comrades, throw herself back into the fight, and make herself useful. With decidedly less conflicted feelings this time, even. And if the bond opened again? Now that Ben had outright admitted he wouldn’t be going back to the First Order again, he might even provide her with useful intel. She could have those conversations without embarrassing herself, she was sure of it. But first, she slept.

She woke wondering where Ben would be jumping to that day. The next morning, she wondered if he’d gotten to wherever he’d headed for yet. The morning after that, if he would stay where he’d landed or just travel for a while, see the galaxy.

That evening, she was recognized by the wrong crowd and forgot to eat dinner because of all the running and shooting, so the next morning she just woke hungry. Deciding that she’d be crazy to eat one more ration when she could be having Real Food while her search for the Resistance lasted, she found the nearest inhabited planet and went grocery shopping.

The galactic constant of marketplaces was comforting. Even without Ben beside her to point out wholes and parts of meals that went well together, or were easy to prepare for beginners like her, or were similar to other things she’d decided she liked, or which happened to be favorites of his, at least the sights and sounds and smells themselves were still there. If Rey closed her eyes, she could pretend she wasn’t alone in the bustling crowd with an echoing void where the other half of her soul should be. If she tuned out everything else, she could almost hear him calling out to her to ask how many joganfruits she wanted, or if she’d ever tried whatever type of fish he’d spotted now. (No, of course she hadn’t. Oceans and the proof that they really, _really_ hadn’t been made up by heat-raving lunatics in the deep desert were still an amazing discovery in themselves. Fish, the entire notion of them? Absolutely wild.)

"– Rey! _Rey!_ "

Frowning in confusion, Rey opened her eyes – and stumbled back with a yelp.

"No, you can’t be here, what are you doing?!"

He’d come after her again, that crazy, masochistic –

"Don’t run," Ben warned, pointing. "I swear, if you run I’ll –"

He really shouldn’t have started about running, because now it was the only option that came to mind. So Rey turned tail and ran.

"REY!"

Ben ran after her.

Rey had just enough presence of mind to be glad he was wearing her sashes over his face as usual. She ducked and dodged but mostly banged and shoved her way through the masses, Ben hot on her heels. When she passed a second-hand droid merchant’s stall, she executed a sloppy pirouette and swept her arm across the road, flinging droids and droid parts everywhere with the Force. She didn’t stop to check if it worked, just kept racing for her unnamed ship.

Why she was surprised to find he’d beaten her there, she really couldn’t say. His brow was dotted with sweat that wouldn’t have been there if not for the pain. Her ship’s landing gear barely seemed like enough support to keep him upright. He pulled the veil down from his face.

"Get inside so we can talk. _Please,_ " he said, before Rey could formulate any thoughts beyond _oh, Ben_.

Shoulders slumped, she complied. But she did make a point of keeping as much distance from him on the way up the ramp and through the corridors as she could, even though it made no difference to the amount of pain he’d be in at such close range.

"You couldn’t just have holoed?"

"Would’ve defeated the point."

Rey whirled on him. "Which is?"

His shoulders were squared, but his hands shook and his face looked – naked, somehow. Open, vulnerable. Almost pleading.

"I’m not going back, but I don’t want to leave either." He paused, as if to give her the opening she’d need to reject him outright. But she couldn’t reject him. She couldn’t even stop her lips from trembling. "So please, don’t tell me to go again. I should never have agreed to go and I won’t do so again. I don’t want us to part. I’ll bear the pain if that’s what it takes, it doesn’t matter. I love you and love hurts anyway."

Rey closed her eyes against a wave of emotion. "I love you too, Ben. But I don’t want to hurt you."

"This pain is nothing new. It’s just more literal than before."

"I don’t think I could live with myself if I agreed to do that to you."

"I’d rather feel like this for the rest of my life than spend one more minute the way I have the past few days without you. Rey."

He stepped toward her. Moved in on her. Crowded her against the wall of her tiny living quarters. She let him, had run all the fight out of herself on the way to the ship. Let him take her face between his hands with nothing but a gasp for the shock of recognition that ran through her and the echo of knives of white-hot pain that shot up his arms. His lips twisted, tightened, and then smiled tremulously.

"Who said this has to be forever? I’ll keep looking for a way to fix it. You don’t have to come with me on any more excursions if you don’t want to, but if what _you_ need to be okay with keeping me around is a fix, then I’ll find one. But I’d take you either way. I’d have you if it hurt another thousand times worse."

The very air seemed to teeter on the edge of something. Hands shaking against her cheeks, Ben leaned in until their noses and foreheads pressed together and his breath came short and rough and his eyes were all screwed up and tears sprung to his lashes. Rey knew, with an insight that could only come through the Force, that she shouldn’t stop him now no matter how fast the tears streamed down her own face.

"I love you. It’s worth it. I love you. We’re not meant to be apart," he rasped, pushing through the pain. "You said the entire universe is open to me, but all I want is the spot right beside you. Let me give you that simple life where loving and being loved is enough. It doesn’t have to be this way – I _know_ that, I know it, I know it, _I know it_."

"Ben..." She couldn’t hold back anymore, she had to touch him. She clasped her hands over his and nuzzled his face with hers. _"Ben."_

And then he was kissing her. And like a dam breaking, that awful pressure in the Force released, and the excruciating, twisted-up wrongness that had tormented him all these months unwound, and the pain washed away.

Their lips parted as he sucked in his first unburdened breath since she forced the air back into his lungs in the hollow temple. Her mind spun and her heart soared. They stared at each other, his eyes dark and wide and crinkling wetly at the corners with joyous amazement, and she dove back in and kissed him again, and again, and again, her hands on his shoulders and splayed across his back and woven through his hair and everywhere else she could touch him. His arms were around her waist, not doing anything except keeping her hoisted up against his broad chest to perfect kissing height, which was all she ever wanted them to do from now on.

They kissed and touched and reveled in the sheer _you’re here you’re mine you’re okay_ of each other until Ben’s knees gave out beneath it all. He turned them around, slid down the wall, clutched her to him and buried his face in her neck, sobbing and swearing and saying her name over and over. Rey hugged back just as tightly, rubbing up and down between his shaking shoulders. She made soothing nonsense sounds and peppered his hair with kisses as a much older and in some ways even more insidious hurt thawed and unwound – from around him _and_ her – under the warmth of each other’s bodies.

Finally. _This_ was right. _This_ was how it should be. This was how Rey was going to spend every waking moment not dedicated to eating or watching Ben cook for her for the foreseeable future.

Breakfast, lunch, and dinner later, Ben lay in Rey’s bunk and Rey lay on top of Ben. They were both only half dressed, but too content for the time being to bother with anything more. Not when she could use him as her pillow and pet his face and play with his hair and enjoy the rumble of his satisfied little noises, like the purr of a great cat.

They fell asleep that way. And when they next woke, Rey vowed this would be how they’d wake up for the rest of their lives. No matter what it took.

"I always knew you’d see the light about your terrible career choices one day," she lied, knowing he didn’t believe her and knowing it didn’t matter. "And I’m glad it’s finally happened. But no, I’m not letting you hand yourself over to the authorities, or anything else of the sort. That would completely defeat the purpose of you being _mine_."

She could feel the exact moment his satisfaction and affection won out over his guilt. While the admission of said guilt was still new enough to be so easily pushed aside, she was going to exploit it.

"I like that," he rumbled. "Say it again."

"Mine." She nipped at his jaw. "Alllll mine."

The question was a serious one, though, and it seemed more real now than it had when glimpsed through the fog of Ben’s unnatural agony.

What _were_ they going to do?

They’d walked away from their respective factions easily enough when the hollow planet was drawing them in, and stayed away with minimal consideration while they were struggling with the aftereffects. Ben had made his decision when it came to the First Order, and Rey still didn’t want to go back to the Resistance. But she couldn’t just _do_ that, could she? It seemed selfish in a way she just couldn’t justify to herself. There was no higher purpose or deeper bond calling her away from the fight like it had called her toward Ben – or was there? A sinking suspicion was forming about what that accursed temple had been trying to do to them, but it was so _convenient_ , she was ashamed to give voice to it.

Perhaps the better question was: did she _have_ to have an excuse to be selfish about this?

She lowered her face to Ben’s chest and just breathed against his breastbone for a bit, while his big, warm hand trailed up and down her spine.

No, she decided. No she did not. The galaxy wasn’t a kind or generous place unless she made it one – for others _or_ for herself. It was time to be generous to herself for a change.

It was an easy decision to make when she was thinking what she was thinking, but she made sure to make and confirm it to herself before she opened her mouth anyway.

"Ben." He opened his eyes, saw the look on her face, and cocked his head, his full attention instantly on her. "That planet, that temple, it gave us exactly what we kept telling everybody we wanted. But let’s not kid ourselves anymore: we both know that wasn’t _really_ what either of us wanted. If we’d gone down those paths, we’d have been alone on them. We’d have been lonely forever."

He nodded, urging her on.

"And... and I’m beginning to think we’ll never bring balance to the Force or victory to either Side of it if we keep fighting. Against _or_ alongside each other. We can keep throwing Force-strong bodies onto the scales, but all it’ll do is make them tip more wildly when one of us inevitably falls off."

He nodded again, more slowly. His thoughts seemed to have been going down the same kind of lines, which – Force, she loved him.

"I’m fairly certain that’s why the temple called to us. Why we haven’t been able to figure out if it was a site of the Light Side or the Dark Side. It’s neither. Even temperate Jedi and Sith sects were offshoots of the two most radical movements of Force-sensitive action and intent the galaxy has known in – well, in known history, and they reflected their origins clearly. But this place truly was meant to be neutral. As uncaring of human loyalty or morality as a tide or a sun.

You and I are the only trained Force-users left in the galaxy. And we’re powerful – _abnormally_ powerful, and only getting more so as Snoke and Skywalker and all the others of their magnitude have died off. I think the planet’s magic, or mechanism, or whatever it’s best called, it sensed the extremes of the anomalies we are in the Force, and it tried to neutralize them. Us."

"Take us out of the equation," Rey agreed. "Keep such a huge share of the balance from hanging on nothing but our positions on the scale. We’re too heavy. We outweigh all the other pieces on the board. So if the war ended and we were still at odds... the Force still wouldn’t settle. War would break out again _solely_ because of us."

"Probably," Ben said with a half-shrug.

Rey made a face. "Stop agreeing with me. It’s insane. Where the hell is the free will of a galaxy’s worth of souls in all this?"

"Outvoted by the will of _us_ ," Ben said grimly. "That’s the Force. Gather enough of it in one place and it creates its own kind of gravity. And like all gravity, it snatches up and pulls everything in sight into its orbit. Snoke and Skywalker’s teachings didn’t agree on many things, but they did on this. They understood how one choice by the right catalyst can realign the polarization of the Force for the entire galaxy. It’s why Skywalker’s arrival alone was enough to turn the tide in the war against the Empire, how he could singlehandedly take down a Death Star, how his defeat of the Emperor and... and his redemption of my grandfather, meant the war was over within a year, even though the Empire had been so deeply entrenched for so long, it should logically have taken decades and more to dig it all out."

"And it’s why Snoke wanted _you_ so badly, wasn’t it?" Rey asked, voice quiet.

"Yes."

She spread a hand over his heart, and he squeezed it with his own.

"And if our Force-sensitivity means it’s as simple as the right person making the right choice, then – you can’t simply go back to fighting for the Light either, can you?"

"Well, I could, if our current war was all we cared about," he said with a not _entirely_ sincere levity – which he dropped entirely for the words that followed. "But if I joined you in the Light, something or someone would just awaken in the Dark. And to balance out the both of us in the Light? That Darkness would be unspeakable."

"Light rises and Darkness to meet it," Rey murmured.

"Exactly. He wasn’t just saying that."

Rey shook her head. "The temple was right. The two of us need to be taken off the board."

"If balance is the goal for both of us... yes."

Rey frowned at the weirdly flat and neutral way he said that. "What else would it be?"

Ben was quiet for a while.

"Ben?"

"To _live_ , Rey. To be happy again, now that I finally remember how!"

"Ben!" She couldn’t help but laugh. "I’m not talking about dying, you idiot!"

He stared. "You’re not."

"No. What were we talking about before, huh?"

"...right." He kept staring until his brain corrected course from that sudden dark twist and he got on her wavelength again. Then he brushed a lock of hair from her face and cupped her cheek. "Right. We take ourselves off the board."

"The only thing I’m worried about... when the hollow planet did that to the ancient ruler, it resulted in centuries of chaos."

"Sounds like propaganda to me, but that doesn’t matter either way." Ben shrugged. "Everything is already chaos, us leaving can’t exactly make it _worse_. And the First Order doesn’t have the Empire’s weight in history, so I don’t think we’ll be depriving the galaxy of a miraculously swift turnabout by bowing out early either."

"Okay," Rey said. She grinned, and Ben smiled, and she grinned wider, until her cheeks hurt with it. "We take ourselves off the board. We meet in the middle."

"Where neither the Jedi nor the Sith wanted us to be," Ben continued her thought, out loud, until Rey took it over again:

"Together. In love. Equal. Giving and taking in our own balance. _Attached._ Attached to each other and detached from all the rest of the galaxy and its enormous stakes..."

"... _for the sake of_ the rest of the galaxy. It’s..." His mouth twisted. " _I_ think it could work, but that doesn’t necessarily mean the Force would agree with our circular reasoning..."

"No, I agree. I think it could work."

"At the very least it would be something new to try? Neither the Jedi nor the Sith have let the galaxy just _be_ for over a thousand years."

"Yes. This is what we need to do. I feel it. This is why we’re bonded the way we are."

She laughed. Ben most certainly did _not_ laugh.

"I want us to be bonded because we’re meant to be happy together, not as just another way for the Force to turn us into helpless pawns in –"

But she kissed that thought away and stroked his cheek until he remembered how much she loved him, and thus, how unlikely it was that she’d meant it so coldly.

"It’s a matter of perspective, Ben. Circular reasoning. One can’t be without the other. It’s like us. It’s... it’s just _us_. We’d never have to be apart and alone again."

"Us," he repeated, full of wonder, and stroked her cheek too. "Just us."

The war raged on and then out, the stars and moons and planets turned in their orbits, and somewhere out there were two people who had never been meant to be alone, and from that day forward never were. But after that night, they were gone, never to be seen again. Or at least, never to be reported on again.

Subtle difference.

"YES! FOUND YOU!"

Rey nearly jumped out of her skin. Ben felt well-honed instincts kicking in and threw his body over hers as if to shield her from a grenade.

"BEN SOLO, _where_ have you been, don’t you know how... worried... I’ve..."

The Force Ghost of Luke Skywalker fell silent, his eyes nearly bugging out of his translucent blue head.

"Could you have any worse timing?" Ben fumed, belatedly pulling the sheet back over his ass. "Serious question. I want to be prepared."

"What in seven Corellian hells are you two..." Luke’s ‘I’m Dead, I Know Everything’ feature belatedly kicked in; they could almost follow along with the progression of his cosmic information download from the rapid cycle of emotions on his face. "Blistering bantha balls. That’s... that’s..."

At a loss for words, he put his hands on his hips and shook his head, his expression halfway between reproachful and just plain weirded out.

"And of course _this_ is how you celebrate. Kids these days."

Squawking like an indignant porg, Rey pulled Ben’s broad shoulders more securely over her chest.

"For the millionth time, celibacy isn’t a natural state for all of us, _uncle_."

That wiped the prudish Jedi matron look right off his face and replaced it with gobsmacked delight. "Uncle? You called me uncle! You haven’t called me uncle since –"

"You tried to murder me in my sleep? I know. Now get lost before I figure out a way to punch you in the teeth."

"Get lost before _I_ do!" Rey said hotly.

"Alright, alright, I know when I’m not wanted."

"Do you really?" Ben asked acerbically. _"Really?"_

"Oh, hey, I’ll let your mother know where to find you, okay? My calls are untraceable, so you won’t have to worry about anybody you don’t want finding out where you’ve disappeared to!"

Rey and Ben opened their mouths to protest.

"Don’t worry, she’s a six hour trip away from here. That should be plenty of time for you two to finish up and make yourself presentable, right?"

"Okay, fine. Now get out," Ben said.

"And you better be presentable, because I’m not making her wait one more minute for –"

"GET OUT," Rey roared, and Skywalker threw up his hands and finally vanished.

Ben punched the mattress beside Rey’s head with his face. Half a dozen times.

Rey patted his hair. "So that’s what you meant when you said he was pestering you before all this started."

"You have no idea what I meant. You don’t _want_ to know what I meant," he muttered darkly. Then he lifted his head, and cupped her cheek, smiling. "But you know what him being back means? It’s now _officially_ over."

Rey smiled back.

They made those six hours count.


End file.
